Doctor talks about his special mission in Vietnam

Dr. Andrew Cottingham was part of an elite special forces group made of various specialists who went into hostile parts of war-torn Vietnam in the '60s to study the transmission of disease.

With the help of a PowerPoint presentation, the former Green Beret and licensed ophthalmologist spoke about his time in Vietnam Tuesday night in the Northern Montana Hospital Conference room C.

Cottingham, who had been invited to speak by former student and Northern Montana Hospital ophthalmologist Marc Whitacre, started the presentation by emphasizing the role disease has played in taking lives in wars.

"Throughout the history of warfare, in virtually every major conflict, more soldiers have fallen from the battlefield as a result of disease than from battle-related injuries," he read off a slide. "In Vietnam, the situation was no different."

During the time of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, two of the major disease outbreaks were a uniquely resistant malaria and plague, he said.

Cottingham was part of a highly trained, multi-disciplined medical specialists team assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and attached to the Fifth Special Forces Group while in Vietnam. He had been trained to operate many kinds of weapons, and he was already an ophthalmologist.

During his presentation, Cottingham would occasionally expound on a particular weapon used by him or his team.

That M3 grease gun was enough to knock a man down and keep him down, he said. That thing could lay down some fire, he said another time.

In 1965, the U.S. Army Special Forces Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Field Epidemiologic Survey Team, WRAIR-FEST, with Cottingham in tow, he said, took their investigative skills into remote areas, getting there often by jumping out of flying aircraft, to study disease transmission. From 1966 to 1968, important studies of diseases such as malaria, scrub typhus and plague were conducted.

This was probably the first time such research was conducted under combat missions, Cottingham said.

During their research, it was discovered that the indigenous fighting units were developing clinical malaria. While part of WRAIR-FEST, Cottingham attached himself to an elite group of the indigenous Montagnard peoples, he said. The Vietnamese group, called the Mike Force, was trained by U.S. military to fight the North Vietnamese Army. He went deep into the jungle with the Mike Force to find the source of the resistant malaria.

As time went on, a hypothesis was developed, and Cottingham's unit eventually gave 52 indigenous soldiers chloroquine plus a placebo, and another 53 received chloroquine plus the dapsone, he said. The dapsone proved effective and a medicine had been found to combat that strain of malaria.

As for the plague, among the people who contracted it was his lieutenant, Cottingham said. The plague was treatable, but a  more important question was if it was biological or natural. It wasn't uncommon for governments to use disease in times of war, he said.

After the presentation, Cottingham took a few questions. He told listeners a Righteous Brothers song he heard while in Vietnam made him so homesick it almost made him tear up, and one of the best things to come out of his time in Vietnam was meeting wonderful people, some of whom he keeps up with to this day.

Cottingham works with Barton Associates, a locum tenens company that contracts with Indian Health Service, which sends out doctors like him where they're needed. Every month, usually for a week, he travels from his home in San Antonio to north-central Montana, stay in Havre and work at the Rocky Boy clinic.